inexpressibly dreadful. She wrote letters for me beside, and was
really most kind and useful, and her society supported me indescribably.
She was odd, but her eccentricity was leavened with strong common sense;
and I have often thought since with admiration and gratitude of the tact
with which she managed my grief.

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of
our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to
whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it. Cousin Monica
talked a great deal of my father. This was easy to her, for her early
recollections were full of him.

One of the terrible dislocations of our habits of mind respecting the dead
is that our earthly future is robbed of them, and we thrown exclusively
upon retrospect. From the long look forward they are removed, and every
plan, imagination, and hope henceforth a silent and empty perspective. But
in the past they are all they ever were. Now let me advise all who would
comfort people in a new bereavement to talk to them, very freely, all they
can, in this way of the dead. They will engage in it with interest, they
will talk of their own recollections of the dead, and listen to yours,
though they become sometimes pleasant, sometimes even laughable. I found it
so. It robbed the calamity of something of its supernatural and horrible
abruptness; it prevented that monotony of object which is to the mind what
it is to the eye, and prepared the faculty for those mesmeric illusions
that derange its sense.

Cousin Monica, I am sure, cheered me wonderfully. I grow to love her more
and more, as I think of all her trouble, care, and kindness.

I had not forgotten my promise to dear papa about the key, concerning which
he had evinced so great an anxiety. It was found in the pocket where he had
desired me to remember he always kept it, except when it was placed, while
he slept, under his pillow.

'And so, my dear, that wicked woman was actually found picking the lock of
your poor papa's desk. I _wonder_ he did not punish her--you know that is
_burglary_.'

'Well, Lady Knollys, you know she is gone, and so I care no more about
her--that is, I mean, I need not fear her.'

'No, my dear, but you must call me Monica--do you mind--I'm your cousin,
and you call me Monica, unless you wish to vex me. No, of course, you need
not be afraid of her. And she's gone. But I'm an old thing, you know, and
not so tender-he